On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:

> The 20-minute long fsck after a botched reboot was irritating enough a
> few years ago that I just put a long list of umounts in my
> /etc/rc.shutdown.local.  One can't unmount any partition that contains
> daemons from that file (since it gets run before the kills are
> issued), but in my case nothing runs from the biggest partitions.

Of course, that only helps with a certain kind of crash. For all the
other kinds of crashes, I've often thought we should support a setting
in "/etc/fstab" to permit designated file systems to be "fsck"'d in
the background. I think the rc.d script would be trivial, if both
"fsck" and "mount" first grew a "-P pass" option, with the default
being that "mount -a" and "fsck -p" should ignore passes of "3" or
greater without "-P 3+", while "fsck" with no options or "mount -A"
could do them all.

Frederick